Category: The Economist

YOU have multiple jobs, whether you know it or not. Most begin first thing in the morning, when you pick up your phone and begin generating the data that make up Silicon Valley’s most important resource.

ON JULY 10th police in O’Fallon, a Missouri town of about 80,000 people, made a statement about the modus operandi of an armed gang that had been using “Pokémon Go”, a video game, to prey on the locals. “You can add a beacon to a Pokéstop to lure more players,” the lawmen explained.

FOR more than 80 years particle physicists have had to think big, even though the things they are paid to think about are the smallest objects that exist. Creating exotic particles means crashing quotidian ones (electrons and protons) into each other. The more exotic the output desired, the faster these collisions must be.